The Roman poet Propertius is best known as the writer who perfected the Latin love elegy, a technical as much as a psychological and cultural feat. Propertius has been admired for both his metrical genius and the modernity of his narrative flow.

Many of the poems here pay tribute to Cynthia, Propertius's romantic obsession, but the scope of these 107 elegies is broad. Propertius's poetry offers a fascinating look into life in the Augustan age, addressing social, political, and historical subjects. A contemporary of Virgil and Horace, Propertius has influenced scores of poets--from Ovid to Housman to Pound.

His poetry appears here for the first time in a dual-language edition with the translations facing the original Latin. Rendered into English by a poet who is also one of the nation's pre-eminent Propertius experts, the volume brings Propertius's difficult mix of vernacular and high literary allusion into contemporary language.

"Cynthia was the first. She caught me with her eyes, a fool
who had never before been touched by desires.
Love cast down my look of constant pride,
and he pressed on my head with his feet,
until he taught me to despise chaste girls,
perversely, and to live without plan.
Already, it's been a whole year that the frenzy hasn't stopped,
when, for all that, the gods are against me."

Alex Katz has found his audience. It s not the first time. Over seven decades, the artist has developed his vision with determination as the tides of avant-garde and academic fashion ebbed and flowed. His first audience was other painters (including de Kooning and Philip Guston), and today, still, he is perhaps best understood by other artists: those who appreciate how difficult it is to make something so simple, so well. Working in a representational style while his classmates celebrated Abstract Expressionism, eschewing slick surfaces for a pared-down view while his peers went glossy with Pop, Katz cleaved to one vision, a few locations, and subjects. Katz s endurance and commitment to developing an original American style is explored in depth, from his boyhood influences to an artistic circle that included John Ashbery, Ted Berrigan, Lois Dodd, Kenneth Koch, Frank O Hara, Fairfield Porter, Yvonne Rainer, Larry Rivers, and Paul Taylor. Sketches, works on paper, and archival material selected by the artist s son, the poet Vincent Katz, give a fuller picture of the painter and his world. The more than 250 paintings reproduced at an unprecedented scale will be the most comprehensive collection available in a single publication.

Before the rise of Pop Art proper, Alex Katz developed an iconic style of figurative painting in the early 1960s— influenced by film, television, and billboard advertising. Seemingly detached and incredibly stylish, he created portraits of the New York scene as well as idyllic landscapes. Printmaking plays an equally central role in Katz’s work. He uses lithographs, etchings, silkscreens, woodcuts and linocuts to reproduce, reflect and further reduce his bold aesthetic, while retaining the radiant color characteristic for his paintings. Since the first edition in 2011, Katz has almost doubled his output of prints—this timely new edition includes his complete prints, cutout editions, artists’ books, and also lists his works of applied art like book illustrations and public art projects. New essays and interviews with the artist give profound insights into the work of one of the foremost American artists of the present.